Wednesday, October 31, 2012

My friend Victor Dover has taught me more about the importance of streets to community, and the characteristics that can make them great, than I ever might have imagined. I’m still learning, and it’s a fascinating journey. He’s about to share his knowledge with all of us, as he reports that he and his urban compadre John Massengale are writing a book on the subject to be published next year. I don’t know John as well as I know Victor, but he seems to know his stuff, too; this one promises to be a must-have when it comes out.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Guess what? In 2011, more people were taking trips around the region, but more and more are taking transit and cycling. Those are just some initial conclusions from our 2011 Trip Diary survey that we’re able to share today!

Market Square in Houston is among one of the most successful urban park renewal projects. Over the years, the Square transitioned from the city center’s historic district to a parking lot to a green area to art space, never having a real sense of purpose or welcoming. Yet in 2010, through collaboration and partnerships, the park was transformed. City government, local development groups, residents and property owners all came together and formed consensus on a plan for the park, designed to preserve its historical and artistic roots.

Charles Marohn is a Professional Engineer (PE) and a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). He has a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology and a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute. He is the author of Thoughts on Building Strong Towns (Volume 1).

He combines these essentially geeky credentials with an urbanist's sensibility. He's interested in the creation of healthy neighbourhoods, in building community. He questions and challenges his engineering colleagues, analyzing costs/benefits of road infrastructure projects particularly in the medium and long term. The existing development model that dates from the years after WWII, "creates modest short-term benefits and massive long-term costs," he says.

Today's municipalities' drive to create new growth to keep up with the costs of earlier infrastructure amounts to a "Ponzi scheme". And. as we all know, Ponzi schemes come to unpleasant and abrupt ends. He claims no magic bullet solution but offers clear eyed perspective and outlines the mostly self-evident measures that need to be taken without delay. We knew prior to building this unsustainable car oriented model how to build strong neighbourhoods, communities, towns. We need to take a look back to learn how to repair some of the damage done.

I've recommended to our Mayor and Council here in Nanaimo (a laboratory in which to study the damage done to neighbourhoods by sprawl, malls and busy arterial roads) to read Marohn's Thoughts on Building Strong Towns and ask their senior managers, planners and engineers to brief them on whether in their opinion he's got it wrong and if so, how. And what if he's right?

Monday, October 15, 2012

Great public spaces are where celebrations are held, social and economic exchanges take place, friends run into each other, and cultures mix. They are the “front porches” of our public institutions – libraries, field houses, neighborhood schools – where we interact with each other and government. When the spaces work well, they serve as a stage for our public lives.

Some thoughts in regards to the boat basin marina plan proposed by the Pacific Northwest Marine Group: The obvious: the waterfront walkway and marina add up to a truly successful public space by any standard anywhere in the country. The elements that contribute to this success are many and any plan that adds to the wonderfully dynamic diversity of uses would be welcome. By the same token, to eliminate any element from this alchemy would be potentially a serious mistake. Our terrific little city is not a theme park. If PNMG's plan can't maintain all the elements currently in place: full secure access for Protection Island residents and other locals; full secure access for tug boat operators and commercial fishers -- with affordable moorage rates guaranteed for the duration of the agreement -- you should not support the proposal IMO. Frank Murphy

Excerpts from SpacingVancouver editing-contributor and local urban designer Brendan Hurley's Robson Street: Envisioning a Civic Core for Vancouver’s Downtown examining Robson Street from block, neighbourhood and downtown-wide scales and offering design interventions intended on treating the corridor through its public realm and development as a complete and active link that helps to define the civic nature and structure of the City’s core.

NEW YORK, NY.- It was an ad campaign conceived as eye candy to bring attention to other advertisements in New York's transit system. But the "Meet Miss Subways" beauty contest posters of pretty young New York women and their aspirations quickly evolved into a popular and even groundbreaking fixture that ran for 35 years, from 1941 to 1976. When photographer Fiona Gardner first learned about it she "immediately wanted to know what happened to all the women." She set out to find out...

More than a mile of Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue will be open to pedestrians, cyclists, roller-skaters, dancers, and kids on Sunday Oct. 14 — but not cars — as the city holds its first Sunday Streets event from 11 am through 4 pm.

A veteran of [the] circuit, Tom Ryaboi has been working the rooftops of his native Toronto and other cities since 2007. "Maybe it's because I've always had cats," says the 27-year-old, whose Twitter handle is R00ftopper. "Who really knows?" We called up to Ryaboi for some thoughts about views from the top, city life on the ground, and what exactly it takes to frighten someone who's willing to scale skyscrapers just to snap a photo.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Expo 86 brought SkyTrain, a waterfront market and optimism that the city named by Queen Victoria was on the cusp of a new beginning. Good things come to those who wait: a quarter-century later, it seems it’s finally happening.

The face of our suburbs is changing whether some of us like it or not. The real question is this: can suburban residents come to see a difference between good change and bad change, and come to embrace the former in order to eschew the latter?

Librado Romero/The New York TimesRick Horan and Kevin Boyle took their never-ending quest for ideas to the High Line in Manhattan.

The two men solicit ideas across New York City, from Rockaway Beach, where they live, to Wall Street. They get the usual spectrum of New York brushoffs: suspicion, skepticism, total lack of interest. But, inevitably, in a city that prides itself on intellectual and entrepreneurial ferment, they also get a lot of ideas.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

"Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will. The world has lost its humane dimension and reacquired the factual necessity and fatefulness which were characteristic of primitive times. But while the chaos of the barbarian was constantly ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man's planning can be given as a reason for the world being as it is. Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners."

"... I still maintain that Vancouver needs to create additional housing choices, both for those seeking more affordable housing, and the many longstanding residents like me who may soon wish to downsize while remaining in their neighbourhoods, and want to see their children living in the City as well.

From: Frank Murphy
Subject: Audain Emily Carr collection to go to WhistlerDate: 3 October, 2012 2:20:08 PM PDT To: Mayor&Council@nanaimo.ca Cc: GeneralManagers@nanaimo.ca, sasha.angus@investnanaimo.com
Have we got Mr Audain's phone number?http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/Whistler+world+class+West+Coast+museum/7337147/story.html This collection should be on the Island. Nanaimo strikes me as an excellent place for it. Audain and his wife also own some of the very finest EJ Hughes paintings. Let's invite hime over to see the mural… Seriously, this world-calss collection would be a game changer for this little city that so desperately wants to confidently take its place in the wider world. If you don't know the details of the Audain Foundation please research. This should be pursued vigorously and quickly. Give him a call, invite him over... Frank Murphy

Keith Loutit, using tilt-shift technology, displays Singapore “The Lion City” like never before. The render technique is amazingly fresh, using a blur-focus wave on various depth to give each static scene a dynamic vibe.The Lion City from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.Read more at Urban Peek: The Lion City - Singapore

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Cities around the world are constantly throwing up new questions: How can we ensure adequate housing for all? How can we live more sustainably? How can we live harmoniously in increasingly multiethnic environments? The questions are almost limitless, and it can be hard for those in the urban field to keep up.

I live in DUMBO, a Brooklyn neighborhood named for its location "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass." As one of the world's most concentrated areas of technology, design and urban startups, DUMBO has been a veritable laboratory of answers to urban questions. Read more: polis: TEDx Tackles the Future of Cities

From BC Ombudsperson Kim Carter's introduction to Open Meetings: Best Practices Guide for Local Governments:

Municipal law was changed to require that municipal governments hold meetings that are open to the public, in order to imbue municipal governments with a robust democratic legitimacy. The democratic legitimacy of municipal decisions does not spring solely from periodic elections, but also from a decision-making process that is transparent, accessible to the public, and mandated by law. — The Supreme Court of Canada in London (City) v. RSJ Holdings Inc.

One of the cornerstones of open and transparent government in British Columbia is the requirement for local governments to conduct meetings that are open and accessible to the public. Providing citizens with the opportunity to observe and engage their elected representatives fosters trust and confidence in decision-making processes and allows for meaningful participation and contribution from informed citizens. Open meetings act as venues for education and enable both elected officials and members of the public to make more fully informed decisions. In the course of investigating and evaluating complaints concerning the implementation of open meeting provisions in the Community Charter and receiving information from local governments, we became aware of some common challenges as well as effective ways of addressing them.

This guide grew out of an interest in sharing some of that information in order to help local governments comply with statutory requirements, to improve consistency in practice as well as to showcase the best practices for local governments to follow when fulfilling their open meeting requirements. At the heart of these best practices are the same values that the Office of the Ombudsperson strives to uphold: openness, transparency, and accountability. We promote and uphold these values because they are essential to ensuring that citizens are treated fairly and reasonably by public authorities.PDF of the full report here.

Monday, October 1, 2012

"Increasingly it’s clear that Motordom has no real constraints; it’s always planning for the next big project, always claiming that expansion is necessary to solve the congestion problems that it creates and then decries..."

More disturbing, though, is the disconnect between the money we’re prepared to spend on more roads and the refusal to fund more transit – particularly South of the Fraser where it is most needed to help shape growth.

The gap is too wide (and now getting wider) between what we need, what we know will work (e.g. the Canada Line) and what our plans call for, compared to the car-dependent transportation system (more and wider roads) that has a very poor record of solving congestion problems.

Triumph of the City — How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier / Edward Glaeser

Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong / Alan Broadbent

Urban Planning For Dummies / Jordan Yin

Walkable City — How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time / Jeff Speck

Walking Home — The Life and Lessons of a City Builder / Ken Greenberg

Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller — Oil and the End of Globalization / Jeff Rubin

Wrestling with Moses : How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City / Anthony Flint

[The motorcar] exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highway till the open road seemed to become non-stop cities... Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbours became strangers. This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much longer to run.

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[An abridged excerpt from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs]

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with improvisations.

The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)…

The heart-of-the-day ballet I seldom see, because part of the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks.

Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, shuts up his shop for a while and goes to exchange the time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters the luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts a compliment on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming.

As darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes on under lights, eddying back and forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza dispensary, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop.

Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless something calls them together, like the bagpipe. Who the piper was and why he favored our street I have no idea. The bagpipe just skirled out in the February night, and as if it were a signal the random, dwindled movements of the sidewalk took on direction.

When he finished and vanished, the dancers and watchers applauded, and applause came from the galleries, too, half a dozen of the hundred windows on Hudson Street. Then the windows closed, and the little crowd dissolved into the random movements of the night street.

I have made the daily ballet of Hudson Street sound more frenetic than it is, because writing telescopes it. In real life, it is not that way. In real life, to be sure, something is always going on, the ballet is never at a halt, but the general effect is peaceful and the general tenor even leisurely. People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is. I am afraid people who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads — like the old prints of rhinoceroses from travelers' descriptions of rhinoceroses.